Make this fall wreath for your home!

This is the perfect way to spice up your home this fall! This wreath is super easy to make, and only cost a few bucks. The grapevine wreath I found at a thrift store, however ones similar to these can be purchased at most craft stores.

It's time to dust off those old magazines with all those pretty pictures you've been hoarding under your bed! Creativity has just come knocking on your door.

With my first craft show coming up, I knew I

Did you know Etsy now offers the ability to create coupon codes? Yes, that's right! You will now see this when you look at your shopping cart:


If the shop you are buying from is offering a coupon code, you can enter it in the

Every Etsy sellers dream....a way to put items on sale quickly and easily! This website, Etsy On Sale, allows you to put a shop section on sale. It simply uses Etsy API to edit your listings for you. I tried it myself and it works great!
So here's how it's done.

Go to Etsy On Sale, at the top right corner, click "Sellers".

Click "Sign In" with your google account (or watch the demo video below it instead). After signing in with google, you will be asked to set a time zone, and to allow Etsy Access. This is necessary in order for the site to be able to use Etsy's API to edit your listings for you.






Now you will be taken to a page that tells you to choose a shop, and you will see your shop banner. Click it!

Next you'll go to your dashboard. To create a sale, click "Sale Events".

After clicking that, click "Create New Sale". Follow the instructions on that page. You will be able to name your sale (this won't show up anywhere on Etsy, it's just a way to keep track of your sale events on your dashboard), choose a shop section you want to put on sale, choose a start and end date, a certain amount of $ or a percentage off your item prices, and also a title that will appear at the beginning of your listings.
When you're done, click "Schedule Sales Event".


And that's it! Now you will see your sale event on your dashboard like this:


One thing though. When it's time for the sale to start, give it 10 minutes to begin. That is how long it takes for the site to edit your listings.
So in other words, if you schedule a sales event for 4 PM, it will start at about 10 minutes after.

For more info, simply visit etsyonsale.com and watch the demo to find out how it's done.

Have fun, and I hope this saves you a lot of time!

Oh, and just so you know, I used this to put my manly sports bookmarks on sale at 25% off! Manly bookmarks for boys and men.

Wouldn't it be cool to have a box that matches your business cards? Darcy shares how you can make a business card box that's super cute and fun!

A box like this would be great for holding your business cards at craft fairs and shows.





Craft on,

Samantha is kind enough to share a tutorial on how to make a cute fabric flower!

Samantha is a wonderful young Christian lady who has a lot in common with me...she loves photography, music crafting, and baking! My kind of girl! She has a blog, Simple Delights, where she blogs all kinds of crafty things.

She also has a great tutorial on making this neat fabric flower.



Here's a quick preview before going to the main post.

You'll need these things:





Samantha will walk you through the instructions step by step, and in the end, you'll have your own very beautiful fabric flower!

Visit Simple Delights-How to Make A Fabric Flower to find out how to do it.

A body can never have to many tips on this subject! So here's some tips for you, based on my very own method.

So recently I started redoing my photographs. I thought I'd share what I do, as I think I have made some really nice improvements.

Originally I was using black or gray fabric. I didn't like how the grains of the fabric where showing up though, so I went to walmart and picked up a large sheet of really dark gray poster board.
I'm glad I did!

I also have started using a nice big rock in some of my pictures too. It adds a really nice effect!

Now for the lighting. I am lucky enough to have an umbrella set up with daylight bulbs, but you can emulate this effect with a window and a white sheet!
My daylight bulbs simply emulate natural daylight, and the umbrella softens and spreads it so it's not all focused on one small spot.
The umbrellas are convenient, but you can have the same lighting effect by covering a brightly lit window with a white sheet.
It's important to use a white sheet, otherwise your pictures will have white balance problems.
Also make sure all other windows in the room are covered in white sheets. If there are other color curtains on the other windows, your pictures will come out having the color cast of those curtains.

Now putting it all together.
Put some sort of hard surface beside your window, and place your poster board on top. You can also bend the poster board up and put something behind it, that way you can take your pictures at different angles and not have to worry about weird things showing up in your background (such as your bed :-D)

You'll have to experiment to get the lighting to fall on your products just right.

I also recommend using a tripod and self timer...this has really made a big difference in the sharpness of my photos!


My last 9 listings are testimony to how well this method works. If you look back over some of my older listings, you'll see the difference!

Here is a "before" picture.



And here are some "after" pictures.





Nice huh?

Also, if you do want to get umbrellas, I got a set of 2 that came with stands and daylight bulbs for about $60 on ebay...that's a really nice price!

Hope this is helpful!

Thought I'd share a few tricks I use with my product photography. I use my portrait umbrellas to take my actual pictures with, and I currently use GIMP for editing, though I intend to upgrade to Photoshop later. Still, GIMP does quite a bit!

So here is what my setup looks like! If I had zoomed out anymore, you would see how messy it really is! Our house is currently unfinished, but that's not always a bad thing...I have learned to use what I have available to me, and in this case, it's a scaffold! Since the scaffold is in the way, I use it for a surface to take my pictures on!
I also enjoy portrait photography, so I have umbrellas and daylight bulbs available. However, you don't really need these, you can use a light box surrounded by lamps, or even hang a white sheet over a brightly lit window for diffused lighting.
Notice how you see 2 colors of backgrounds? I typically use white, black, or gray. In this case, you can see the black and gray. Since I don't have much space, I tend to pile them all on top of each other, hence, the gray on top of the black.
On top of all that, I have placed a large sheet of glass. I took the glass out of a large picture frame I purchased from a thrift store. The glass makes for a nice smooth surface, and it gives a nice effect to most products, especially jewelry, but lots of other things too. It has a clean look too.



Now for the editing part. As I said earlier, I don't have photoshop right now, so I use GIMP. You can get a copy of GIMP for free on the web. I usually start with adjusting the white balance, or color balance as GIMP calls it, as most of my product pictures tend to need some correction in this area. You may need to experiment a little to get used to how this works, but it's fairly simple once you get the hang of it.
Notice how my picture has a bit of a green cast to it. I need to get rid of this. The background should be gray, not green!
So I'm going to correct this by adjusting the color balance. In GIMP, click Colors > Color Balance. I will be adjusting the midtones in this picture.


For this picture, I slid the Green toward Magenta by 12 (-12) and the yellow towards blue by 12. See the difference? Much much better! (I usually look at the real thing and then compare my picture to that to get the best accuracy.)



Now I am going to adjust the brightness and contrast. Go to Colors > Brightness and Contrast. I bumped the brightness up by 2 and the contrast up by 12. (Also note that if you really need too, you can also go to Colors > Curves to adjust the exposure, however, that was not needed in this photograph.)


Now for a little enhancement. Lets sharpen the picture up a bit. Go to Filters > Enhance > Sharpen. I sharpened the picture by 60.




Now, since my picture is over 3 mb (I use the Nikon D80, which is 10 mp) I'm going to scale the image size down for Etsy. Etsy recommends a size of 1000 pixels wide. I do mine at 800. So go to Image > Scale Image, and highlight the width, and type 800 or 1000 or whatever you want. There's no need to adjust the height, as GIMP should do this automatically to keep the picture's proper proportions. Click the "scale" button.




Wala! Here is the finished result! Nice!



One more thing...Etsy tends to soften up your pictures a lot, so a bright pink will become a soft pink, etc. This is because Etsy does not accept color profiles, (see this thread for details), but one thing you can do if this is a big problem is to increase the saturation of your photo before uploading to Etsy. The picture will look too saturated on your computer, but once it's on Etsy, it will look softer like normal.
I didn't do this part here because it would have looked bad since blogger has no trouble with color profiles that I know of.

There you are! I hope this tutorial on photography helps you out a bit with your product photography.

Crafty Tutorials:

How to make a business card box tutorial.

DIY Felt Sunflower Wreath Tutorial for Fall

DIY Fall Wreath- Pumpkins, Acorns, Pinecones, and Sunflowers for Fall

DIY Cardboard Organizer Cute and Cheap!

DIY Bags for Craft Shows

Photography Tutorials:

How to enhance photos with GIMP tutorial.

Photography Tutorials On Handmadeology